baking: does it come easily to you?

i'm an artist not a scientist, baking is annoying

talking more about bread and stuff than cakes tho obv

i'm still sulking from my last loaf attempt and that was probably like a year ago :/

You're right, Ledge - it shouldn't go without saying that a reliable oven is both necessary and hard to gauge if you aren't habitually cooking. If I'm considering a new baking recipe I read at least ten of them to get an idea about what I should be doing/which cooks are overcomplicating with ingredients/timings and then apply the law of averages. Metric baking is great because all the other science is in mg/ml, so.

I'm pretty fond of saying that baking is really shopping plus science and art, so if you've got all three, you're golden. So glad your boyf is a good cook, Lex.

i don't even understand why anyone bakes bread. even the best bread isn't THAT nice or mindblowingly flavourful and bread is super-cheap. if you're gonna go to the trouble of baking something make a CAKE or a PIE or BAGELS or something somewhat exciting, surely.

All the above give ones house the scent of baked goods. That is irrepressible.

I am sort of interested in baking but only marginally more than say, brewing my own beer. Neither feels essential, surrounded as I am by an ever-growing army of yuppie shops and offies.

even the best bread isn't THAT nice or mindblowingly flavourful

would tend to disagree.

super-cheap, do me a lemon

The best homebaked bread isnt that much better than yr yuppie shop loaf costing three quid tho

i do like the idea of having a pet sourdough starter though, just malevolently getting hungry in the fridge

maybe take it for walks and stuff

i'm maybe a better baker than I am cook. When I was growing up everyone else in my family cooked, but no-one else in my family baked, so when a friend got me into baking it was like 'oh this can be my thing'. I don't really get the "follow the recipe to the letter" thing - so many baking recipes contain the mysterious quantity "one egg"! How can you be super focused on having exactly 175g of caster sugar when "one egg" could indicate a huge range of sizes and levels of freshness? (though this comes from fancy baking: if you've made macarons and had make sure you have 90g of egg whites that are untainted with yolk and also three days old, and still found there's flexibility, then... who cares about going over or under on amounts for a cake that people have been making for years of variable ingredients and variable ovens.)

Cooking and baking require a lot of talent to be really excellent at, but to be pretty good you only need a small amount of talent and the rest is learnt skills. The ways in which i'm only a pretty good cook and could improve are mostly to do with inexperience, unfamiliarity with processes, etc - i don't have the confidence of saying when a specific vegetable is done, how much more time something needs, whether a flavour needs more seasoning, etc. I'm used to the processes of baking, I have workarounds for the annoying stuff, I understand what the terminology means and when to stop or continue doing something: it's not that it comes easily, it's that it's become familiar.

having made bagels at home a couple of times tho i reckon i'd still buy them instead. so much faff.

The best homebaked bread isnt that much better than yr yuppie shop loaf costing three quid tho

i'd say usually it wouldn't be better at all?

untrue, there's nothing more delicious than feeling smug

This has dried figs, fresh figs, fig purée, marinated figs and stewed figs in the batter, and a mix of melted butter and fig jam coating the top.

Why do I have a sudden craving for apples

I disagree with the "baking is science" thing once you're talking about bread and pastry, where even a simple thing such as "wet your fingers to reconnect the pastry" requires a velvet touch. I like bread makers tho. I like the cubic loaves they produce, and I like making my own baguette with them.

And bread is my favourite starch
I could live the rest of my life eating little baguettes stuffed with blue cheese and pecans but after a single slice of pie I'm usually done with pie for a couple days

Voted "good cook, stink at baking," but stink isn't the right word. I'm okay at it, just not interested enough to get really good. I've made several different kinds of breads, thought "okay, that's something I can say I've done," then go back to working with proteins and vegetables and more interesting edibles. I found out good homemade biscuits are actually pretty easy, but frozen biscuits are just as good, really.

I chose can't cook, can't bake even though I can do the basics of both, just don't have much skill or interest in either.

I mean, the question is "does it come easily to you" -- and I guess if baking requires precision, patience, and the desire to eat a lot of baked goods, my answer is "no" not because of skill/ability, but because of (1) lack of desire and (2) the preference for being creative in other ways. if i spent all my time baking things that i didn't want to eat, that would be kinda weird.

i'm very much a "hey if all the ingredients taste good together and i don't use too much or burn any of them i am SET" kind of cook so baking is not for me. i try to do my share of the cooking at home but the wife handles all the baked desserts and stuff.

I'm a mediocre baker, I keep it to soda breads and cookies and things that are batters instead of doughs. I've never made bread all by myself with the kneading and the punching down, but I grew up on homemade bread and unless my memory fails me it is PHENOMENAL.

Salty cookies 4eva

Salty cookies and spicy apple pie, dear celestial beings above.

I have made one hell of a lot of pizza dough breadsticks though when I was unemployed and broke and hungry. Yeast and flour are cheep.

I'm good at baking, but most people I've met irl that are bad at it really just don't follow directions, or are like LL's work friend and think Cool Whip is heavy whipping cream or whatever. It really is all about following the directions word for word. The "baking is a science" thing is not an entirely true statement, but there is a lot of science that is fundamental to baking and it's very important to know the role of each ingredient and not just go "Well I'm on a low salt diet so I skipped the salt, but I can't figure out what I did wrong." Beyond that, there is a lot of technique involved, but if you start with some basic recipes it's pretty simple stuff.

I tried to get into the "bake by weight, not volume!" camp for a while but realized that it doesn't make that huge of a difference; I go by the scoop-and-level method and it works out just fine. As long as your flour, sugar, salt, baking soda, baking powder etc adhere to an approximate ratio you should be OK.

If I learned how to make really lemony poundcake I WOULD EAT SO MUCH POUNDCAKE so it's better that I don't know.

salty brownies for me -- i've made a wide array of cakes and stuff like that. this is fun flavorful baking imo.

the kind of baking i don't like is "it took half a day and made a huge mess for me to eat this piece of bread and then watch it get stale before my eyes because no two people can eat that much bread that fast and no one wants your gift of partially stale bread" baking, ie a waste of my time/energy.

desserts and savory pies are worth time and energy. y'all can have the rest.

are calzones/empanadas/pasties "baking"? that's the kind of baking i enjoy.

I'm a good cook for the most part, but several recent experiments with yeast breads were all flops. I don't mind buying store bread, but it was disappointing when the panettone didn't work--that stuff is NICE for breakfast.

I'm considering trying one of the no-knead bread recipies floating around the internet. Yet simultaneously I'm thinking MAYBE I should be cutting back on starches. Well, I contain multitudes (which is the problem that has me thinking maybe I should give up starches).

There was a while when I was being really good about making a lot of cookie dough and freezing it in tube shapes, rolled up in plastic wrap & foil, and then slicing off cookies like 8 at a time so I could have fresh ones every few days. That was pretty smart.

tbf i haven't really tried to bake enough to determine if i'm actually any good at it but it does not feel like it comes naturally to me

I have one really good no-knead bread recipe; I'll try to remember to post it when I get home. But I have tried a few others that were disappointing.

Homemade bread is for when you are having guests for dinner and want the house to smell wonderful! Otherwise, yeah, way too much bread.

I can only barely remember homemade doughtnuts and I have never really longed to deep-fry anything else in the food world, but I would eat homemade doughnuts until I felt sick.

There's some good, easy bread recipes in the tassajara bread book -- I think it was recommended to me from ilx in the first place. I like baking and it isn't something I have had many problems with. It's omelets that I'll never get right.

I'm very, very good at bread but pretty shit at anything else. We almost never buy bread anymore. I just made two loaves of a great honey oatmeal bread last night! (Having a KitchenAid mixer w/a dough hook is key here btw.)

YES. I was lucky enough to get the industrial grade motor KitcheAid mixer and it does a lot of the work for you. I don't think I'd really enjoy baking much if I didn't have it, because my arthritis makes it painful to do all of that mixing and kneading by hand.

I'm a good enough cook and love baking. Have given up on grains though so I only bake two or three times a year, usually scratch cakes and fruit crisps/cobblers. I was baking all our bread until a few years ago, and made some really nice loaves.

Misread this as 'barking'.

I am a good cook, because I have practiced it almost daily over many decades, and the process of cooking interests me. I hesitate to say I stink at baking, but I have never pursued it and can claim no more than a very basic proficiency. I'm pretty sure I could raise my baking a couple of notches, if I were to put in the required effort.

Misread this as "banking". I am an ok cook/ok baker, though I bake only occasionally and have never tried making bread.

i am a terrible banker, however

TS: baking vs. banking vs. barking vs. braking

barking comes really easily to me, that's an easy yes

really feeling the people itt talking about not liking to follow recipes. i made pistachio muffins yesterday, they were maybe the most successful thing i've ever baked, but my friend really had to rein me in, put measuring cups in my hands. who doesn't love the cavalier oil drizzle, the impulsive transfer of ingredients from their container to the bowl. i feel spoiled by cooking, too; when you cook you mainly cook with things you understand, whereas it's hard to attribute the same kinds of value to things like flour that you wouldn't eat independently. they are more like numbers than ingredients. i always thought it was like the difference between drawing & painting; drawing is so immediate, from your eye to the page, but painting involves a lot of counterintuitive moves, wanting red but knowing you need to paint brown first. baking is really confusing. i know there are comforting dimensions, cool techniques you get to get into like pestle & mortaring, kneading, &c, but i think some of the satisfaction i get from cooking is from feeling like all of the things i did worked out, & that's toned down when you have to obediently follow a recipe so it doesn't screw up.

see I get the opposite comfort from following a good baking recipe, for me it's like having a reassuring, confident voice to get you through the weird parts, so you don't second guess yourself. i'm kinda particular about who I bake with now - ie america's test kitchen can gtfo with their needlessly complicated baking shenanigans.

who doesn't love the cavalier oil drizzle, the impulsive transfer of ingredients from their container to the bowl.

hah, i don't

i love baking and i guess at this point it comes fairly easy/naturally to me, i used to pester my grandma and mom into helping them bake stuff when i was a kid. but yeah i like having a recipe to follow because i like checking stuff off of lists, what can i say. i'm a bit freer in cooking admittedly.

me flamboyantly catapulting hastily grasped fistfuls of ingredients into pans against the ambient noise backdrop of sizzling onions is one of my real Joys Of Cooking, i am really insistent on this sensation existing at the heart of any kitchen experience i go out of my way for

donna otm: lists! <3

on the contrary, schlump quite otm *plays bridge*

in our house, in general I'm the cook and my wife is the baker. it works out pretty well.

I tried making these at my wife's request (she saw the recipe online): https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1018450-pistachio-rose-and-strawberry-buns

Did not get the dough to come out right, it didn't rise as much as it should. Still tasted OK, and the filling is very good. Two things, though — to some degree it just tastes like a fancy peanut-butter-jelly sandwich; and there is evidently no way to puree pistachios for "pistachio cream" and not have the resulting mix look kinda like poop lol.